T A B L E+T A L K Who or what introduced you to the best books you've read? Thank your sources publicly in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The Treatment By Daniel Menaker Fiction (05/28/98) The Overspent American By Juliet B. Schor Nonfiction (05/27/98) I Know This Much Is True By Wally Lamb Fiction (05/26/98) Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing By Ved Mehta Nonfiction (05/22/98) A Monk Swimming By Malachy McCourt Nonfiction (05/21/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer F E A T U R E Punch drunk By Vivian Gornick Norman Mailer's collected essays reveal the sad legacy of a writer who couldn't stop fighting (05/27/98)		_________now it's time to say G O O D B Y E BY DALE PECK FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX FICTION 458 PAGES BY ROB WALKER | Young American novelists strike many poses these days -- clever, savvy, confessional, shocking, pissed-off, self-aggrandizing, ironic (especially ironic) -- but what they rarely are is merely sincere. Dale Peck, however, is a young novelist whose first two novels struck many readers as remarkably sincere, as though he really believed he could win you over simply by stringing together one lovely sentence after another. This is also true of Peck's third book, "Now It's Time To Say Goodbye," despite the fact that its plot is both sensational and preposterous. Both of Peck's previous books pushed the envelope, but each did so through narrative experimentation more than over-the-top story lines. His first novel, "Martin and John," was not so much about two characters as about two roles, to whom those names are applied in a variety of set pieces dealing with love and AIDS. John shows up again in Peck's second novel, "The Law of Enclosures," which is mostly about a couple named Henry and Beatrice -- though their story is unceremoniously interrupted by a 50-page memoir from a character named Dale Peck. This time out we get a sort of hyperpotboiler centered on Colin, a successful writer, and Justin, his ex-hustler lover. They say goodbye to New York City and the long roll call of friends lost to AIDS. They move to a small, racially divided Kansas town beset by its own plague of secrets and almost immediately get caught up in the tornado of crimes and misbehavior whose eye is the lynching of an albino black boy. There's enough violence and sex here for three or four novels. There are several savage beatings. A man gets shot; a dog gets shot. There's a fire and a hanging and someone is run off the road. At one point someone else is apparently ripped apart by pigs. Then the pigs get shot. Meanwhile, everyone gets laid. In the telling, Peck switches among more than a half-dozen narrators, black and white, intelligent and dim, young and old, straight and gay, male and female. A bit much? Sometimes, yes. But for the most part, the book works surprisingly well, partly because Peck is able to pile up some fantastic sentences. So even as it becomes clear that the town's vast and terrible secrets are neither plausible nor particularly illuminating on matters of race or sex, it's still hard not to get caught up in the onion peeling. Inevitably, though, the book's conclusion doesn't match its unwieldy buildup. Peck goes overboard with loaded names, including a mysterious woman who calls herself Rosetta Stone. Add that to the invocation of the names Martin, John, Henry and Bea, and it finally feels like some sort of code, which I'd just as soon leave to grad students. Storywise, that's a distraction. But Peck's aim isn't so much to draw you into this tornado as to blow you away with his words, and it's impressive how often he actually does this. I suppose you could make a case that what I'm calling Peck's sincerity is as much a pose as anything else. But I prefer to think of it as a stance, which is something braver, and something different altogether. SALON | May 29, 1998 Rob Walker is a senior editor at Money and has written book reviews for The Nation and Newsday.